KAREN was all the rage in Seattle last week when Prime Minister Helen Clark visited the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab UW) and linked by video conference to the HIT Lab NZ at the University of Canterbury.

The annual conference of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) was held in Birmingham on 13 March. JISC funds a range of ICT services and programmes to support education and research, including JANET, the UK equivalent of KAREN.

REANNZ has awarded over $2.6 million to ten projects in the first round of its Working Group and Development Fund. This fund is aimed at developing capability around the use of KAREN and advanced networking techniques.

The ten successful projects are led by eight KAREN member organisations, including five universities and three Crown research institutes, and span the fields of e-research, microbiology, earthquake engineering, bioinformatics, grid computing and the social sciences.

The British Library has digitised and made available online two of Leonardo da Vincis' notebooks - called the Codex Leicester and the Codex Arundel.

Tune in to Radio New Zealand National's Insight programme at 8.15am this Sunday 18 March for a documentary piece on Business and Broadband, including interviews with early adopters of KAREN.

Professor Marcus du Sautoy from the University of Oxford is presenting The Music of the Primes, a public lecture exploring the mystery of prime numbers on Thursday 15 March, 6pm.

Does all of the jargon that comes with eResearch confuse you?